Behavioral choices both at work and outside the workplace can affect the health and productivity of employees. The health and productivity of employees are important to employers and can be related to costs, for example, in terms of lost productivity and healthcare costs. Healthy employees save an employer money on health insurance premiums and lost days of productivity as illnesses and work absences result from unhealthy life style choices. For example, diabetes and heart disease have resultant costs that are paid for by patients, employers and governments. In certain situations, healthier lifestyle choices can reduce or even eliminated many of these costs. Diabetes, for example, affected 24 million in 2008, according to the CDC. This represents an increase of nearly 3 million people since 2006. That same year the disease killed approximately 72,000 people. Heart disease, which killed over 800,000 people in 2006, according to the CDC, affects about 80 million Americans and is primarily caused by poor diet and lack of exercise over a lifetime.
In an attempt to reduce these costs and to encourage healthier behavioral choices among employees, companies have developed incentive systems for living a lifestyle that is deemed healthier. For example, health rebates can be awarded for going to the gym and eating a healthy diet. Other systems have also been implemented to award good user behavior. For example, insurance companies reduce regular payments if a customer does not smoke and participates in regular exercise. For certain companies, employees contribute a portion of their own health insurance through premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. Since the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, allows employers to differentiate premiums based on an employee behaviors, which can be represented, for example, by weight, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and smoking. Incentive programs that provide rewards to employees, however, can be too expensive for companies or do not provide sufficient motivation to encourage good behavior.
Additional low costs or no cost stimulus programs are desired for encouraging healthy behavior are desired. Various methods exist to address good behavior without spending large sums of money like putting names on boards and giving symbolic, i.e., inexpensive, presents. Similar types of awards are used by parents and teachers, for example, allowing children and students to participate in fun activities as a reward for good behavior. But this kind of awards is not applicable to adults. Therefore, low or no cost incentives to encourage healthier behavioral choices in adults both at work and outside the workplace are desired.